Observability & SRE
Dashboard Query Cost Estimator
Enter panel count, refresh interval, time range, and series per panel to compute daily query count and monthly platform cost for your dashboard fleet.
No data is transmitted — everything runs locallyTool
About this tool
Dashboard Query Cost Estimator
The Dashboard Query Cost Estimator computes daily query volume and monthly cost from panel count, refresh interval, and time range for Grafana Cloud and Datadog.
• Estimate Grafana Cloud costs before deploying a high-density operations dashboard
• Calculate the query savings from switching from 30-second to 5-minute refresh intervals
• Model the cost impact of adding recording rules for the most expensive dashboard panels
• Compare dashboard-driven costs vs alert evaluation query costs
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FAQ
What does this tool tell you?
The Dashboard Query Cost Estimator computes daily query volume and monthly cost from panel count, refresh interval, and time range for Grafana Cloud and Datadog.
What affects the result most?
Grafana Cloud metrics query cost: queries × data points scanned × $0.0008/million DPS. Dashboard refresh impact: 20-panel dashboard × 30s refresh × 24h = 57,600 queries/day. Query optimization: reducing time range from 7d to 1h reduces DPS by ~168×.
How should I use the result?
The calculation is deterministic — the same inputs always produce the same output — so the most useful workflow is to vary one input at a time and see which factor moves the result most. That tells you where to focus your attention before committing to a decision.
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